Re: The Whole Enchilada

Joshua Kerievsky wrote:
> A typical floundering team has:
>
> * 2,347 bugs.
> * broken builds
> * extraordinarily slow manual testing
> * great big knowledge silos coupled with beginners and intermediates who
> improve at the rate of a tortoise
> * very unhappy customers
> * big fat PRDs (product requirement definition) that took 1.5 years to write
> and are already out-of-date with what competitors are doing
> * stressed out workers
> * no (or little) inspection or adaptation (oh my gawd, they're supposed to
> be doing that but they aren't!)
>
> Now imagine all of the above co-existing in a context of standing up,
> sprinting and having a product owner. That's simply ineffective. Yet we
> get call after call in which that is exactly what has been "installed."
Josh, what you're describing sounds very different from the complaint
that people are doing Scrum, but still writing poor quality code. It
sounds like you're working with people who wrote Scrum on the door, but
don't have any enchilada at all.
This is quite different from what I hear Martin Fowler and Ron Jeffries
and Jim Shore describe.
- George
--
--

Re: OT: Looking for something new to fiddle with

jaredhirsch <jaredhirsch <at> yahoo.com>
2009-02-01 02:56:48 GMT

Two thoughts:
(1) How about going inward instead of outward? Maybe
spend some time refactoring an existing/stale C#
project to recultivate the love of poetry which is,
ultimately, no more tied to any programming language
than human poetry is tied to any natural language.
(2) I suggest the oldies: the Smalltalk 'blue book',
or the LISP 1.5 manual. Both are (I believe) free at
ACM's 'classics' website. If you ever wanted to really,
really learn Smalltalk, the blue book is the way to
go. It's the Moby Dick of computer documentation.
--- In extremeprogramming <at> yahoogroups.com, Chris Wheeler
<christopher.wheeler <at> ...> wrote:
>
> Hey everybody,
>
> I'm looking to scratch an itch right now, so I'm throwing this
question out
> there: What language/technology/tool are you playing with in your
spare time
> that you find cool? I'm bored of ruby, and do C#, VB professionally
and am
> wondering what to spend some spare time dabbling. Weird as it seems,
I'd had
> a bit of a hankering to revisit C lately, don't know why, and maybe
explore
> Objective-C on my Mac. But, what are some of you guys and girls

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Re: What if code-smells were counted as "vulnerabilities"?

Brad Appleton <Brad.Appleton <at> gmail.com>
2009-02-01 14:51:10 GMT

Olof Bjarnason wrote:
> I think you have an opportunity here: educate "those" that YAGNI is
> about features, not code quality.
Yes - I tried. I think theyre inclined to make YAGNI be about what THEY
want it to be about so they don't have to make that particular change in
mind-set/culture.
--
--
Brad Appleton <brad {AT} bradapp.net>
Agile CM Environments (http://blog.bradapp.net/)
& Software CM Patterns (www.scmpatterns.com)
"And miles to go before I sleep" -- Robert Frost

Re: IDEs, Pair Programming, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Brad Appleton <Brad.Appleton <at> gmail.com>
2009-02-01 14:53:56 GMT

Steve Freeman wrote:
> Given that this is the XP list (and not a generic Agile list), my
> preference is that all development environments are the same. Once
> settled it becomes one less thing to think about so I can focus on the
> real work. Partly this is about focus and reducing opportunities for
> mistakes, and partly this is about a social declaration that this is a
> team.
Interesting ... the above makes the case for treating "standardizing on
an IDE" to be basically an extension of the need for a common "coding
standard" for the team
--
--
Brad Appleton <brad {AT} bradapp.net>
Agile CM Environments (http://blog.bradapp.net/)
& Software CM Patterns (www.scmpatterns.com)
"And miles to go before I sleep" -- Robert Frost

Re: The Whole Enchilada

Mary Poppendieck <maryp <at> poppendieck.com>
2009-02-01 14:59:31 GMT

Hi Laurent,
I'm with Josh on this. I see lots of floundering Scrum initiatives,
typically due to the assumption that essential technical practices will
be discovered by "the team" and they are not. Can you explain where the
incentive would come from to write up the stories? Why bother?
Mary Poppendieck
--- In extremeprogramming <at> yahoogroups.com, Laurent Bossavit
<laurent <at> ...> wrote:
>
> Josh,
> > > I keep hearing that. Where are the stories ? The "Journal of Agile
> > > Failure" doesn't even list 6.
> >
> > Are you familiar with NDAs?
> >
> Yes. (Few of my clients bother to have me sign one, though.)
>
> My question still stands: where are the stories ? Case studies can be
> anonymized. Consultants can seek permission to publish, without
> revealing details. The fact that the one site supposedly devoted to
> listing "agile failures" has nearly zero content seems significant to
> me.
>
> These stories would be worthwhile. For instance, I haven't the first
> clue what you call "floundering", and some detailed explanation of the
> mechanism would give me more of a clue as to what (if anything) needs
> fixing in Agile discourse.

Re: The Whole Enchilada

Laurent Bossavit <laurent <at> bossavit.com>
2009-02-01 15:54:15 GMT

Hi Mary,
> I see lots of floundering Scrum initiatives,
> typically due to the assumption that essential technical practices
> will
> be discovered by "the team" and they are not. Can you explain where
> the
> incentive would come from to write up the stories? Why bother?
For the same reason you'd bother to record precise observations of
anything: research. Making hypotheses and breaking them.
For instance, just one question out of the many that come to mind: is
there a significant difference in the floundering observed on teams
where folks have gone through the CSM class, versus teams where folks
have gotten training elsewhere, versus teams who've had no training at
all ?
Referring to my Scrum course handout, I find "inspect and adapt",
"sprint retrospective", references to robust engineering practices,
and other aspects which are missing from the description Josh gave of
a seed that leads to floundering ("standing up, sprinting and having a
PO"). So, an answer to the above question would settle whether the CSM
is failing - because people just don't apply what they learn in there
- or on the contrary the failure lies in applying Scrum without the
training.
Laurent Bossavit
laurent <at> bossavit.com

Re: The Whole Enchilada

Dave Rooney <dave.rooney <at> mayford.ca>
2009-02-01 16:12:05 GMT

Joshua Kerievsky wrote:
> Flaccid Scrum? The Decline and Fall of Agile?
> More evidence that organizations and development communities need a Whole
> Enchilada -- managerial and technical agility, not just one or the other.
>
> The idea that "they will just evolve to adopt the technical stuff" is, in my
> humble opinion and experience, a naive assumption. Most of the time, that
> adoption either doesn't happen or happens so haphazardly that it is as if it
> never happened at all.
>
> Scrum out of the box says nothing about technical agility. It is like
> selling a car without seat belts and other critical safety features. You
> need to be lucky enough to know the right Scrum people who will tell you
> that you need the technical stuff too (though even they make believe in this
> "later adoption phase" idea).
>
I've blogged about this before, and posted a new entry today:
http://practicalagility.blogspot.com/2009/02/scrum-is-not-enough-redux.html
Needless to say, I'm in 100% agreement with Josh, Ron, Martin and James
Shore.
--
--
Dave Rooney
Mayford Technologies
"Helping you become AGILE... to SURVIVE and THRIVE!"
http://www.mayford.ca

Re: [mod] Invitation to connect on LinkedIn

Victor wrote:
> Is something being done about this spam?
It's Chet's fault.
I wouldn't call this spam. It's just an inadvertent posting after
mistakenly associating the list email with someone's name. If the
sender is a member of the list (and not in moderation) there's not much
that can be done to prevent such mistakes from going through.
- George
--
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
* George Dinwiddie * http://blog.gdinwiddie.com
Software Development http://www.idiacomputing.com
Consultant and Coach http://www.agilemaryland.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------